STORY VII PIGGY BOYS AT SCHOOL

 One day Curly, the little pig who had such a funny shaped tail, said to his brother, Flop¹ Ear:

 

"Say, let's run off and look for adventures as Uncle Wiggily, the old gentleman rabbit, used to do!"

 

"Where shall we run?" asked Flop.

 

"Oh, almost anywhere," answered Curly. "We'll go down the road, toward Sylvan² Way, and out beyond the old black stump³, and turn the corner around the place where the apple tree grows, and then we'll see what will happen."

 

"All right," agreed Flop, so the two little pig brothers started off. Their mamma was making some red flannel⁴ pies in the kitchen, ready for winter, and of course she did not see them go, or perhaps she might have stopped them.

 

Pretty soon, in a little while, oh, maybe in about an hour and a half, Curly and Flop came to a building all made of red brick, with a chimney sticking from the top for the smoke to come out of, and a lot of doors and windows in it.

 

"I wonder what that is?" said Flop.

 

"Maybe it's where the skillery scalery alligator⁵ lives," suggested

Curly.

"Oh, no, he lives in a rocky cave under the water," spoke⁶ Flop.

"This isn't his house."

"Then it's where the bad fox lives," went on Curly as he put his nose down in the dirt to see if he could find any hickory nuts there.

 

"No, the fox lives in a stump," said Flop. "I don't know what this place can be."

 

And then, all of a sudden, before you could take a brush and paint a picture of a lion on a soda⁸ cracker⁹, all of a sudden the piggie boys heard a lot of voices singing a song like this:

 

    "We are little children,

     To school we love to go;

     We run along,

     And sing a song,

     In rain or hail or snow."

"Oh, ho!" exclaimed Curly. "That's a school, that's what it is."

 

"To be sure," agreed his brother. "Let's go in and learn our A B C's and then we can go home and tell mamma all about it. This is an adventure, all right."

 

"I believe it is," said Curly. So the two little piggy boys walked along through the front door of the school, right into the room where the nice lady bug¹⁰ teacher was telling the children how to make a straight line crooked¹¹ by bending it, and how to put butter on their bread, by spreading it.

 

"Oh, my!" exclaimed a little rabbit girl, as she saw the two piggie boys in school. "Look at that!"

 

"Quiet! No talking!" said the lady bug teacher.

 

"Oh, but this is like Mary's little lamb, only it's different," said Jonny Bushytail, the squirrel boy, as he remembered the verse about the lamb in school. Only this time it was pigs.

 

And, all this while Curly and Flop just stood there, in the school room looking about them and wondering what they had better do. For they had never been to school before; not even in the kindergarten class.

 

"This is a funny place," said Flop.

 

"Isn't it?" agreed Curly. "They all seem quite surprised to see us."

 

"They do, indeed," agreed Flop and, as a matter of fact, all the animal children in the school were laughing. But the teacher—she didn't laugh. Instead, she said:

 

"Quiet, if you please! Fold your paws, everybody! Now, that the little pigs have come to school we must see how much they know, so we can tell what class to put them in." So she said to Curly:

 

"Spell cat:"

 

"D-o-g," spelled the little pig boy.

 

"Wrong," said the teacher. "I guess you will have to go in the kindergarten class." Then she said to Flop Ear; "Spell boy."

 

"G-i-r-l," spelled Flop.

 

"Wrong," said the teacher. "You, too, will have to go in the kindergarten class. Now, I wonder if either of you piggy boys can make a paper bird in a cage."

 

So she gave each of them a pair of scissors and some red paper, and blue and pink and yellow and brown and all colors like that. But my goodness sakes alive and some candy with cocoanut on the top! Curly and Flop had never learned to cut things out of paper, and of course they did not know how. They just cut and slashed¹² and didn't make anything but scrips and scraps¹³.

 

"Oh, dear!" exclaimed the teacher. "Such piggie boys I never saw!

They can't even be in the baby kindergarten class!"

"Maybe they can do something," said Susie Littletail's new baby sister. "Some trick or anything like that."

 

"Of course we can!" cried Curly, who was ashamed that his brother and himself could do nothing the teacher asked. "Just watch us!" he cried.

 

So he stood up on the end of his tail and spun¹⁴ around like a top, and then he made a squealing¹⁵ noise like a horn and played a tune¹⁶ called "Ham and Eggs are Very Fine, but Ice Cream Cones¹⁷ are Better." Then Flop turned a somersault and stood on one leg, and then the two piggie boys danced up and down together like leaves falling off a tree.

 

"Oh! those little fellows are smarter than I thought they were," said the lady bug teacher. "I guess they can be in our first class after all."

 

And just then a great big, bad, black bear rushed into the schoolroom, and he was going to grab up about forty-'leven of the animal children.

 

But Curly suddenly shouted:

 

"Here, you scoot away from us or I'll make a bee sting you on the nose!" and as the bear was very much afraid of being stung on the end of his soft and tender nose, he ran away as fast as he could and stayed in his den⁷, eating postage stamps for nearly a week, and didn't bother anybody.

 

Then the teacher and all the animal children thought the piggie boys were very clever indeed, and the lady bug invited them to come to school whenever they wanted to. And Curly and Flop said they would come.

 

Then they ran home to dinner and that's all there is to this story. But on the next page, in case the little girl with brown eyes doesn't cut all the green grass for the rag baby's hair ribbon, I'll tell you about Curly being vaccinated¹⁸.

1 flop   

n.失败(者)，扑通一声；vi.笨重地行动，沉重地落下

参考例句：

• The fish gave a flop and landed back in the water.鱼扑通一声又跳回水里。
• The marketing campaign was a flop.The product didn't sell.市场宣传彻底失败，产品卖不出去。

2 sylvan   

adj.森林的

参考例句：

• Venerable oaks forms a sylvan archway.古老的栎树形成一条林荫拱道。
• They lived in a sylvan retreat.他们住在一个林中休养地。

3 stump   

n.残株，烟蒂，讲演台；v.砍断，蹒跚而走

参考例句：

• He went on the stump in his home state.他到故乡所在的州去发表演说。
• He used the stump as a table.他把树桩用作桌子。

4 flannel   

n.法兰绒；法兰绒衣服

参考例句：

• She always wears a grey flannel trousers.她总是穿一条灰色法兰绒长裤。
• She was looking luscious in a flannel shirt.她穿着法兰绒裙子，看上去楚楚动人。

5 alligator   

n.短吻鳄(一种鳄鱼)

参考例句：

• She wandered off to play with her toy alligator.她开始玩鳄鱼玩具。
• Alligator skin is five times more costlier than leather.鳄鱼皮比通常的皮革要贵5倍。

6 spoke   

n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说

参考例句：

• They sourced the spoke nuts from our company.他们的轮辐螺帽是从我们公司获得的。
• The spokes of a wheel are the bars that connect the outer ring to the centre.辐条是轮子上连接外圈与中心的条棒。

7 den   

n.兽穴；秘密地方；安静的小房间，私室

参考例句：

• There is a big fox den on the back hill.后山有一个很大的狐狸窝。
• The only way to catch tiger cubs is to go into tiger's den.不入虎穴焉得虎子。

8 soda   

n.苏打水；汽水

参考例句：

• She doesn't enjoy drinking chocolate soda.她不喜欢喝巧克力汽水。
• I will freshen your drink with more soda and ice cubes.我给你的饮料重加一些苏打水和冰块。

9 cracker   

n.（无甜味的）薄脆饼干

参考例句：

• Buy me some peanuts and cracker.给我买一些花生和饼干。
• There was a cracker beside every place at the table.桌上每个位置旁都有彩包爆竹。

10 bug   

n.虫子；故障；窃听器；vt.纠缠；装窃听器

参考例句：

• There is a bug in the system.系统出了故障。
• The bird caught a bug on the fly.那鸟在飞行中捉住了一只昆虫。

11 crooked   

adj.弯曲的；不诚实的，狡猾的，不正当的

参考例句：

• He crooked a finger to tell us to go over to him.他弯了弯手指，示意我们到他那儿去。
• You have to drive slowly on these crooked country roads.在这些弯弯曲曲的乡间小路上你得慢慢开车。

12 slashed   

v.挥砍( slash的过去式和过去分词 )；鞭打；割破；削减

参考例句：

• Someone had slashed the tyres on my car. 有人把我的汽车轮胎割破了。
• He slashed the bark off the tree with his knife. 他用刀把树皮从树上砍下。 来自《简明英汉词典》

13 scraps   

油渣

参考例句：

• Don't litter up the floor with scraps of paper. 不要在地板上乱扔纸屑。
• A patchwork quilt is a good way of using up scraps of material. 做杂拼花布棉被是利用零碎布料的好办法。

14 spun   

v.纺，杜撰，急转身

参考例句：

• His grandmother spun him a yarn at the fire.他奶奶在火炉边给他讲故事。
• Her skilful fingers spun the wool out to a fine thread.她那灵巧的手指把羊毛纺成了细毛线。

15 squealing   

v.长声尖叫，用长而尖锐的声音说( squeal的现在分词 )

参考例句：

• Pigs were grunting and squealing in the yard. 猪在院子里哼哼地叫个不停。
• The pigs were squealing. 猪尖叫着。

16 tune   

n.调子；和谐，协调；v.调音，调节，调整

参考例句：

• He'd written a tune,and played it to us on the piano.他写了一段曲子，并在钢琴上弹给我们听。
• The boy beat out a tune on a tin can.那男孩在易拉罐上敲出一首曲子。

17 cones   

n.（人眼）圆锥细胞；圆锥体( cone的名词复数 )；球果；圆锥形东西；（盛冰淇淋的）锥形蛋卷筒

参考例句：

• In the pines squirrels commonly chew off and drop entire cones. 松树上的松鼠通常咬掉和弄落整个球果。 来自辞典例句
• Many children would rather eat ice cream from cones than from dishes. 许多小孩喜欢吃蛋卷冰淇淋胜过盘装冰淇淋。 来自辞典例句

18 vaccinated   

[医]已接种的，种痘的，接种过疫菌的

参考例句：

• I was vaccinated against tetanus. 我接种了破伤风疫苗。
• Were you vaccinated against smallpox as a child? 你小时候打过天花疫苗吗？